Browsing by Author "Syrjäläinen, Olli-Pekka"

The effects of musical training are a subject of growing interest in the field of cognitive brain research. Earlier it has been found that in addition to honing the skills directly related to musical performance, musical training also can elicit transfer effects in neuronal circuits affecting other areas of cognitive performance. One such function is attention, which is a cognitive process known to mature during childhood. This thesis seeks to investigate whether early-onset musical training is linked to correlates in involuntary attention shift on a neuronal level in school-aged children. The EEG data was gathered from 69 subjects, 54 percent of whom had received musical training. The subjects were between 11 and 17 years of age, and they were divided into two age-groups (between 11 and 13 years and between 15 and 17 years of age), in addition to the division of musically trained and non-trained control group. We assessed the subjects' involuntary shift of attention with the amplitude of early and late P3a component, evoked by unattended novel stimuli during a visual task the subjects were instructed to attend to. The results show that the amplitude of early P3a decreased for recurring novel stimuli. The effect was found for the musically trained group, but it was absent in the control group. For the younger subjects, the amplitude for late P3a was larger for the control group in comparison to the musically trained group. No such effect was found with the older subjects. Late P3a amplitude was larger for the young subjects of the control group in comparison to the older subjects, an effect that was absent in musically trained subjects. Both the age-related difference in P3a amplitude for the control group, and the training-related difference for the younger subjects suggest maturation of attentional processes. The amplitude of the P3a has earlier been connected to higher use of resources. In light of this evidence, the results suggest that younger musically trained subjects must allocate fewer resources identifying and processing task-irrelevant novel stimuli compared to the control group. However, any age-related maturation in attentional processes present with the control group in this study is absent in the musically trained group. This leads to an assumption that musically trained subjects simply reach the peak of their attentional skillset earlier than the control group, but display no observed attention-related advantages during the late adolescence.